City Hall fined 139 illegal Airbnb listings — out of 24,000

Enforcing the new law is proving difficult

From left: Airbnb Founders Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia, CTO Nathan Blecharczyk and CEO Brian Chesky
From left: Airbnb Founders Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia, CTO Nathan Blecharczyk and CEO Brian Chesky

City Hall made little progress fighting illegal listings on Airbnb. Over the past three months inspectors fined hosts for 139 listings that violated housing laws, leaving almost 24,000 potentially illegal listings untouched.

Crain’s reported that it would take the city 43 years to investigate all questionable listings at the current pace.

Last fall Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law making it illegal to list units for rent for less than 30 days if the owner isn’t present. The idea is to prevent landlords from turning their apartments into de-facto hotels. But enforcing the law is a different question.

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City Hall hopes that fining some hosts will discourage others and bring down the number of illegal listings without having to investigate all of them. One host had to pay a $1,000 fine for renting out her Trump Tower pad.

The company, valued at $31 billion earlier this year, is working with a state legislator to register its New York hosts in a state database and allow them to rent only one unit at a time. [NYP]Konrad Putzier